But what can "mastery" of the outside laws mean but understanding them and and where possible ability to use these "outside" laws for your own (self-given) purposes? To paint it's best if I know the laws of optics, what color mixes produces what colors and the like. I can't, however, change those given facts. I can only use them. Maybe some people find the idea that there's stuff we can't do anything about (like the laws of optics), except use what's given, alienating. But the world has alien aspects, unless you're Hegel. That must be what Engels meant by "Freedom is the recognition of necessity." (A point I made at my only talk at the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, rather inarticulate I fear, back in 1981 or so, where many more distinguished speakers gave far more famous and worthwhile talks.) Hegel meant something else by it, namely roughly that the historical march towards freedom is inevitable and necessary, and I actually sort of agree with that too, but and in one spirit, not Hegel's, Engels might agree in a sense. I'm not sure that is pertinent here.
* * * *
Btw I think Ted overstates the importance of "reason" in the conception of freedom that comes from Rousseau to Marx. Kant of course and following him (though in a different sense) Hegel make a big foofala about how freedom is rationality. Rousseau and Marx do not. They emphasize self-determination. For Rousseau the big point is that real freedom is self-direction of a communal sort, which gives rises to paradoxes about totalitarian democracy. Marx, in this respect a romantic and compared to Rousseau an individualist, puts a premium on creative self-development rather than rational consistency (Kant) or accord with the unfolding of Vernunft (Reason) in history. Here Marx follows the creative idea of Schiller in On The Aesthetic Education of Man, another important work in that tradition.
--- Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen
>
>
> Now, philosophically, if that's what we want to
> discuss, you only find the idea of a law you give to
> yourself alienating because you think of the law as
> something given to you by someone else. Setting up
> your own ideas and following them -- raising the
> building in your head before you put it on the
> ground
> -- is what the old man (yes, yes, I know, why should
> we listen to him, what did he know about anything)
> said distinguished the architect from the bee. It's
> called self-determined imaginative creativity. I
> guess
> I think that will do as an account of freedom I can
> live with.
>
> ^^^^^^
> CB; Isn't the first step in this mastery of
> necessity ? Before you start
> giving "laws" to yourself, you have to master the
> "laws" forced on you by
> nature or something outside you, no ?
>
> ^^^^^^^
>
>
> Your own idea of freedom, which seems to be lack of
> interference by anything, including your own mind,
> is
> merely negative -- Hobbes and Locke might applaud
> it.
> I don't diminish the importance of such freedom, but
> really don't think it's enough. It leaves the poor
> and
> the rich equally free to sleep under bridges and beg
> in the streets. And I don't see how leaving the mind
> out of sex is supposed to make it more liberating.
>
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